Breadcrumb trail

Did more people die in religious wars than other kinds of
wars?

I often hear people complain that "more people died in
religious wars than any other way." That is plain false. Let us consider the
following deaths in this century caused by non-religious conflict where
the leaders all claimed they did not believe in God.

All of the leaders of these regimes claimed they did not believe in God.
These were not religious wars, they were fueled by plain old power and hatred.

Let us never dismiss religion as a pathway to peace. And for
me as a Catholic, I especially encourage us not to dismiss Jesus' wishes to
honour his Church. (Mat 16:18)

The great thinker George Weigel writes about a French
theologian who has done a lot of thinking about the decline of Europe: 2

Henri de Lubac was one of 20th-century Catholicism's most
distinguished theologians. Like other Europeans who had witnessed the
Continent's travail during the first four and a half decades of the century,
Father de Lubac was haunted by the question, "What happened?" Or, perhaps more
to the point, "Why had what happened, happened?"

Father de Lubac was fascinated by the history of ideas, which he knew to be
fraught with "real world" consequences. Thus, during the early 1940s, he
turned his attention to some of the most influential intellectual figures in
pre-20th century European culture. The result was a book, "The Drama of
Atheistic Humanism", which argued that the
civilizational crisis in which Europe found itself during World War II was the
product of a deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible in the name of
authentic human liberation.

This, de Lubac suggested, was a great reversal. In the classical world, the
gods, or Fate, played games with men and women, often with lethal
consequences. In the face of these experiences, the revelation of the God of
the Bible -- the self-disclosure in history of the one God who was neither a
willful tyrant (to be avoided) nor a carnivorous predator (to be appeased) nor
a remote abstraction (to be safely ignored) -- was perceived as a great
liberation. Human beings were neither the playthings of the gods nor the
passive victims of Fate. Because they could have access to the one true God
through prayer and worship, those who believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob and Jesus could bend history in a humane direction. History was thus an
arena of responsibility and purpose.

Yet what biblical man had perceived as liberation, the proponents of atheistic
humanism perceived as bondage. Human freedom could not co-exist with the God
of Jews and Christians. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God,
according to atheistic humanism.

This, Father de Lubac argued, was something new. This was not the atheism of
skeptical individuals. This was atheistic humanism -- atheism with a developed
ideology and a program for remaking the world. As a historian of ideas, de
Lubac knew that bad ideas can have lethal consequences. At the heart of the
darkness inside the great mid-20th century tyrannies [of] communism, fascism,
Nazism, Father de Lubac discerned the lethal effects of the marriage between
modern technology and the ideas borne by atheistic humanism.

He summed up the results of this misbegotten union in these terms: "It is not
true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God.
What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man." That
is what the tyrannies of the mid-20th century had proven -- ultramundane
humanism is inevitably inhuman humanism. And inhuman humanism cannot neither
sustain nor defend the democratic project. It can only undermine it or attack
it. .